


suppose i kept on singing love songs, just to break my own fall

by inmylife



Series: rookie girls collegeverse [3]
Category: Everglow (K-pop group)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Coincidences, F/F, First Meetings, Pre-Relationship, Probably ooc, Trans Female Character, aisha is in looooove, kay tries to emulate sunverse and fails miserably: the series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 16:23:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18392009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inmylife/pseuds/inmylife
Summary: A year later Aisha changes her Tumblr header from a woman sitting in the remnants of a man’s body like she’d hatched, head in her hands, to the art that Yiren’s friend Mena had drawn of the two of them. It’s adorable, it captures the two of their essences almost perfectly, and it showcases the love they have in their eyes when they look at each other. And she changes her background color from blood red to bright pink.Like her site bio says - it gets better. It really does.





	suppose i kept on singing love songs, just to break my own fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nakamoto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nakamoto/gifts).



> this is how my college parents met each other. its just this fucking story. bc i love them. 
> 
> title is from regina spektor - fidelity
> 
> also happy birthday jace

“Your hair looks so soft,” comes a voice from behind her. “Can I play with it?”

Aisha twists around and sees a lithe, elegant girl curled up on the couch behind her. She doesn’t think her own hair is all that soft - she’d describe it as a little rough, actually, and haphazardly cut, using run-of-the-mill kitchen scissors - but hey, she’ll take the gender validation, especially coming from a girl as pretty as this one. “Sure,” she says to the girl behind her. 

She’d like to play with this girl’s hair, Aisha thinks. It’s long and silky. Everything about this girl looks just too perfect - her ballerina body and her smooth skin and her shiny hair. 

It feels nice, the hands in her hair. It makes Aisha feel at home, sitting on the floor of the LGBTQ cultural house at a college she hasn’t even committed to yet, leaning her back against the rough, stiff surface of the ugly blue sofa that the pretty girl and a number of other ‘prospies’ (as she’d heard the students herding them around campus calling them) were crammed onto. 

“I’m Aisha,” she says. She gives the girl above her a smile. 

“Yiren. Nice to meet you.” 

Yiren smiles back, and Aisha begins to think about putting in her deposit. 

 

Orientation. 

There’s lots of people around but she’s already making friends, as unsettling as it is to be swirling in this veritable sea of first-years with a few enthusiastic orientation leaders peppered in. People here are nice. They want to talk to her. Someone whose name she’s pretty sure is Seungeun compliments her high ponytail and Aisha feels her mouth pull itself into a grin wider than she’s made in a while. She gets pulled into a conversation with a girl named Yuna about vegetables and how disgusting asparagus is. A girl even taller than she is (which makes Aisha feel a  _ lot _ better about her height - she’s used to towering over people) invites her to have lunch. She thinks the girl’s name might be Joanne. She goes along. 

The dining hall is big and easy to get lost in, and it’s pretty crowded and hard to find a place for everyone to sit. People haven’t splintered off into little friend groups yet - right now, everyone’s friends with everyone. 

There’s a girl named Lingyi who Aisha thinks lives in her dorm building. Lingyi’s brought a friend named Rian, and Joanne’s roommate Bell is there. From what Aisha can tell, Lingyi is a sort of social butterfly. She stops mid-conversation probably five times to wave to people - presumably-upperclassmen that Aisha isn’t sure how she knows after only being on campus three days, one of the orientation leaders Mirae, other new students with other places to sit. 

And then Lingyi waves someone over, and urges the table to “scooch over! We have space for one more, right…?” 

Bell starts chanting “N plus one! N plus one!” which Aisha thinks sounds suspiciously like math, but scoots her chair over so that whoever it is Lingyi is summoning can sit between her and Rian. 

The girl Lingyi has summoned is ballerina girl. Yiren. The one who played with Aisha’s hair. 

She’s not sure if Yiren will remember her. She hopes she will. She remembers. 

“Hi,” she smiles, pressing onward in this game of make-friends-with-people despite everything in her brain yelling at her to run away in the face of PRETTY GIRL. “I’m Aisha. Yiren, right? We met at… at prospie weekend.” 

Yiren’s face lights up. “I remember you! The Marks House… you had nice hair!” 

Her face  _ lights up _ . Listen, okay, Aisha doesn’t usually think about people in fictionisms but that’s literally what Yiren’s face does. And Aisha is so, so thrown by this beautiful, unreal girl. 

“Hey,” Yiren continues, “has anyone ever told you that you look like the bunny from Zootopia?” 

Aisha blinks. “Judy?” she asks sceptically. “Um, no.”

“Wait.” Lingyi smacks her hand down on the table hard - she grimaces and shakes it out as she continues. “I wouldn’t have thought that before, but you’re right.  _ You’re right _ .” 

“It’s your cheeks,” Yiren says evenly. “They’re round and squishy.” 

Christ. Aisha thinks she might explode. 

 

Between lunch and dinner they sit through an incredibly stupid activity - identity maps. Yeah, Aisha doesn’t want to marker out her identities on a piece of printer paper and show them to the group she’s in (which is entirely cis girls from the Midwest). She refuses to acknowledge being trans on this paper, but instead draws some bullshit about being a dancer and her Chinese Zodiac and some other trivial crap in purple Crayola. One of the girls, Seyeon, asks her to dinner with her friends. Aisha’s lost track of Lingyi and Joanne from earlier (and Yiren with them - the international students stick together like saran wrap), so she goes. 

She remembers Yuna and Seungeun from offhand, passing conversations, and the transfer student Jeje she thinks she went to an infosession with during prospie weekend. The others - Jaehee, Harin, Yeseo, Mika, Yuha - are new faces. So are Linlin and May, the only other people besides herself and Jeje who introduce themselves with their pronouns. May reminds Aisha of a lost baby deer; Linlin seems more like an ancient chaos deity. They stifle a laugh every time someone is awkward, especially May, who they already seem to know pretty well. 

(They have only been on campus for  _ three days _ , how are people already that close?)

Like earlier, everyone’s taking up as little space as they can so they can fit as many people as possible. Aisha finds herself sharing far too much personal space with Harin, who is nice enough and smiles a lot and spends most of dinner drawing gondolas in mechanical pencil on the inside of their orientation folder. Linlin is on her other side - Aisha wonders if it would be entirely tasteless to make a joke about being in a they/them sandwich - and is wearing stickers on their face. Aisha has questions. One of the stickers is an aromantic flag, one is the asexual one, and the rest are chibi-style cats. 

She’s about to ask when Linlin makes direct eye contact with someone not at the table. “Are we n-plus-one-ing again,” she grumbles, before she looks up and sees who it is. 

Christ on a stick, it’s Yiren. 

“Oh, hi!” the other girl says. “See, that makes two people at this table I know.” 

Aisha really has to stifle a laugh. What are the fucking odds - the pretty girl, again? In an entirely separate large group of people from the last two large groups of people she’s seen her in. 

This girl - she’s sunshine and silk, she looks like she should be wearing diamonds and lace instead of a loose-fitting pale pink tee shirt and jeans. She looks like what good expensive chocolate tastes like, like a field full of daisies, like silver and shimmer and glitz and light - like perfection. She reaches across Linlin to hold Aisha’s hands (Aisha might be having a heart attack, or maybe a stroke, or maybe she’s just in love) and her skin is so so soft and her nails have an impeccable and new-looking French manicure. Her voice is airy, it makes a sound like tulle looks, it feels like pinpricks of carbonation on Aisha’s skin (or maybe that’s the seltzer in the plastic cup in front of her). She’s all luxury and Aisha wants to know how Yiren would feel in her arms, on her lips, bare in front of her eyes. She is intoxicating, she’s a mimosa that’s mostly champagne, she’s the way the Warm Vanilla Sugar scent from Bath And Body Works smells. She’s a deep breath in and a perfect fifth and a haunting, intricate, delicate piano melody. She’s harmony and agility, she’s something green and growing, she’s starlight stared up at from under a mystical tree. She must be some kind of fae, she’s lake water lapping in low sounds by the shore, she’s illuminating - she’s slender like a willow, she smiles and Aisha’s heart is full, she’s white feathers and an olive branch, she’s the view from the top of a mountain and a warm summer day but not too hot, she’s crisp, she’s sweet and rich like the cake Aisha had for her fifteenth birthday, she’s a symphony of perfect teeth and deep dark eyes and long long hair. Her face is doe-like, she’s a swan, she’s an  _ angel _ \- 

she’s otherworldly. She’s ethereal. 

And this is the moment in which Aisha realizes she is well and truly fucked. 

 

Her roommate’s name is Mia. Mia has a motorcycle and wears badass thick eyeliner and big hoop earrings, but behind the purple hair and mom jeans there’s a big dork - a big dork who’s a hopeless romantic. 

“You’re so whipped for her.” There’s laughter coming from the other side of the room. Aisha glares at her computer screen. 

“Shut up.” 

“I mean you’ve met her, what, three times? Over two days? And one of those days was prospie weekend?” Aisha hears Mia get up off her bed, hears socked feet walk across the pink braided rug she’d bought for fifteen dollars at Target, feels her own mattress dip down as Mia sits with a  _ whump _ . “Come  _ on _ . This is a level of love at first sight that belongs in - in - I don’t even know. Cinderella? Or love at first hair-touch, I guess.” 

“I regret everything,” she grumbles. “I should have told you nothing. I bought a rug for this room, and a microwave, and far too many power strips, and you are  _ ungrateful _ .” 

“Yeah, and you’ve already broken two of my magnets and we’ve lived here for like three days. I’d say we’re even.” Aisha doesn’t see Mia’s logic there but doesn’t bother arguing. “You know, I bet that if you texted your mom or - wait, who would you text?”

“My cousin Chaeyoung.”

“Your cousin Chaeyoung about this, you know, I’ve been here six days and I’ve already got an almost-girlfriend who’s a model-worthy Chinese ballerina with hair down to her ass, I bet your cousin Chaeyoung wouldn’t believe she’s real. Like a ‘she lives in Canada and we’ll never get to meet her’ kind of thing?” 

“Yeah, except she lives in, like, Princeton.”

Mia sits straight up. “How do you know that.” 

“We all said where we were from at dinner last night,” Aisha shrugs. She doesn’t look up from her computer - she’s talking about conspiracy theories with her friend Loha on Tumblr, which is far more important than Mia getting more excited about Aisha’s crush on Yiren than Aisha is herself. “It’s like an hour and a half away from me. Who knew.” 

“Who knew,” Mia concurs, and Aisha’s gotten to know Mia well enough by now that she doesn’t have to see Mia slowly shaking her head to know that she’s doing it. 

“Okay, now if you’re done please get the fuck off my bed. We’re discussing trees. Important shit.” 

It is kind of interesting. Apparently, there are people who think trees aren’t real trees - that real trees are huge and that plateaus and mesas are really just tree stumps from an ancient world. Aisha won’t call those people entirely crazy. She thinks it’s kind of plausible. 

 

A friend of Mia’s invites the two of them over to her dorm the next night. Classes start the day after tomorrow, upperclassmen are starting to move back in, and most of the firsties are starting to get stir-crazy. 

“They’re really nice, you’ll like them,” Mia promises Aisha as they trek across the Green from Mead to Safford, where Onda lives. Mia brandishes her phone at her, but they’re walking too quickly for Aisha to properly read the text that presumably says it’s okay that she comes along. “They’re a huge sweetheart. Just adorable. Kinda go to the beat of their own drum - you know?” Aisha nods absently. She doesn’t have any strong feelings on the matter, just feels like she needs to leave the dorm more. She mostly sits inside and ignores orientation activities or the involvement fair or people hanging out on the Green, and unless Mia or Yuna invites her to she doesn’t go to the dining hall for food - she stays in her dorm and makes macaroni and cheese in the microwave. Sometimes oatmeal, or ramen noodles if she  _ really _ doesn’t care about the sodium content. Once it was popcorn. 

Mia seems a little fed up. 

It’s not that Aisha’s not an extrovert. It’s not that she doesn’t feel comfortable on campus. Just, you know, executive dysfunction is a little bitch, and if she doesn’t have to leave her room to eat food then she won’t. Simple. But Mia wouldn’t take no for an answer when she’d said earlier “my friend is having a bunch of people hang out in her room, and I’m going to go, and so are you”. 

It’s about 10pm. Aisha’s in ballet flats that probably weren’t advisable to bring with her - it’s been rainy and muddy and tonight is the first time she hasn’t worried too much about getting them dirty to actually wear them - and the soft, gentle tap they make against the wooden floors is satisfying. She hums happily, just one beat, low in her throat. Her phone’s battery percentage is somewhere in the nineties - if she’s bored with whatever they’re doing she can browse memes or something until Mia decides it’s acceptable to go home. She doesn’t really mind. 

The name tags on the door read Onda and Ireon, and while mouthing the names Aisha remembers in a flash Yiren saying something about ResLife misspelling her name on the door and she gets a shock of adrenaline and almost freezes but Mia’s already pushing open the door… 

“Did you know,” she hisses instead, to her evil  _ evil _ roommate, who smiles a Cheshire smile. 

“Doesn’t matter now, does it,” answers Mia. 

Asshole. 

And, yeah, Yiren’s sitting on one of the beds, holding a stuffed sloth tight to her chest, her hair wet, wearing pajamas - flannel ones, even though it’s early September. She’s valid, though, it’s  _ cold _ in this dorm. Yiren’s and Onda’s beds are lined up footboard to footboard, taking up one entire wall, bedrest pillows on opposite ends. Onda’s is blue and Yiren’s is grapefruit pink. There’s a couple others already there; Aisha recognizes Hyeonjeong from her orientation group and thinks she had dinner with Xiwon and Taeryoung their first night on campus. Both sides of the room have fairy lights strung up. Onda’s has the nonbinary flag command-stickered to the wall, and Yiren’s is papered with magazine cutouts of ballet and traditional Chinese dance. She tries not to let her gaze stray to the desk that she thinks is Yiren’s, because Yiren is watching and that would be weird, you know, if the girl you liked were  _ watching you _ inspect the contents of her desk like some kind of creepy stalker, but her eyes fix on a picture frame anyway, and there’s an icy-cold moment where Aisha’s veins seem to freeze because. 

That is Yiren. 

With her arms around a girl, a girl who’s elfin-looking like her, but not similar enough to be a sister, and there’s love in her eyes, and Aisha is scared, scared because all she can think about most hours of the day now is Yiren, and of course she would fall for someone sapphic and unavailable. It’s worse than falling for a straight girl, too, because that way you don’t have the mad hope that maybe, in another life, she  _ could _ have liked you - the hope that you have when you fall for a gay girl who’s off the market. 

“That’s Mena.” 

Yiren’s voice snaps Aisha out of her anxiety like Elsa’s tears melting the ice around Anna away in Frozen but a thousand times faster. 

“Your girlfriend?” she asks, trying to keep her voice cool. 

Yiren laughs. “She’s like my sister,” she says, waving her hand like she’s physically swatting the suggestion away. “Me and Mena? Never.” 

She’s sure her relief is rolling off her in waves, sure that the tension coming out of her body is tangible, but no one seems to notice so it’s all okay. 

“Come sit,” Yiren invites, patting the space next to her. Aisha moves like a zombie or a robot over to her, and hesitates for maybe half a second, and sits. 

“We keep running into each other,” she says, because they’re silent for a moment and Mia and Onda and Hyeonjeong are all talking animatedly about a class they have together and it’s awkward to just sit there and listen. Aisha’s very being feels stale and hesitant and tentative, and she’s starting to get that feeling in her gut that she usually interprets as  _ unsure _ . "Someone clearly wants us to hang out."

“Maybe it’s fate?” suggests Yiren, and Aisha’s eyes might be deceiving her, or Yiren’s face might be turning a little bit red. 

“In that case, maybe we should have each other’s phone numbers then,” Aisha says, shocking even herself at how functional she’s being right now. 

She reaches down, fumbles for her phone, and meets Yiren’s eyes just as she registers that the other girl is proffering hers.

Yiren smiles, and Aisha lets herself begin to hope. 

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to the umass student who commented on the itzy fic in this verse. i hope ur still reading also pls be my friend
> 
> JACE I LOVE YOU. i support ur aisha agenda. HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAPPY BASTARD. UR MY SON. 
> 
> the way i'm deciding who's a firstie and who's not in this verse is essentially their age relative to the group, which is why you have lingyi (a 98 liner) and bell (an 04 liner) in orientation together - they're both the maknaes of their groups. i'm trying to spread people out
> 
> pls follow me on social media my twt is ohmyeverglow and my tumblr is everykissbeginswith
> 
> stay safe! get some sleep! go outside! i love you! bye!


End file.
